-
So, there's about
seven and a half billion of us.
-
The World Health Organization tells us
that 300 million of us are depressed,
-
and about 800,000 people
take their lives every year.
-
A tiny subset of them choose
a profoundly nihilistic route,
-
which is they die in the act of killing
as many people as possible.
-
These are some famous recent examples.
-
And here's a less famous one.
It happened about nine weeks ago.
-
If you don't remember it,
-
it's because there's
a lot of this going on.
-
Wikipedia just last year
counted 323 mass shootings
-
in my home country, the United States.
-
Not all of those shooters were suicidal,
-
not all of them were maximizing
their death tolls,
-
but many, many were.
-
An important question becomes:
What limits do these people have?
-
Take the Vegas shooter.
-
He slaughtered 58 people.
-
Did he stop there because he'd had enough?
-
No, and we know this because
he shot and injured another 422 people
-
who he surely would have
preferred to kill.
-
We have no reason to think
he would have stopped at 4,200.
-
In fact, with somebody this nihilistic,
he may well have gladly killed us all.
-
We don't know.
-
What we do know is this:
-
when suicidal murderers really go all in,
-
technology is the force multiplier.
-
Here's an example.
-
Several years back, there was a rash
of 10 mass school attacks in China
-
carried out with things
like knives and hammers and cleavers,
-
because guns are really hard to get there.
-
By macabre coincidence,
this last attack occurred
-
just hours before the massacre
in Newtown, Connecticut.
-
But that one American attack killed
roughly the same number of victims
-
as the 10 Chinese attacks combined.
-
So we can fairly say,
knife: terrible; gun: way worse.
-
And airplane: massively worse,
-
as pilot Andreas Lubitz showed
when he forced 149 people
-
to join him in his suicide,
-
smashing a plane into the French Alps.
-
And there are other examples of this.
-
And I'm afraid there are far more deadly
weapons in our near future than airplanes,
-
ones not made of metal.
-
So let's consider the apocalyptic
dynamics that will ensue
-
if suicidal mass murder hitches a ride
on a rapidly advancing field
-
that for the most part holds
boundless promise for society.
-
Somewhere out there in the world,
there's a tiny group of people
-
who would attempt, however ineptly,
-
to kill us all if they
could just figure out how.
-
The Vegas shooter may or may not
have been one of them,
-
but with seven and a half billion of us,
-
this is a nonzero population.
-
There's plenty of suicidal
nihilists out there.
-
We've already seen that.
-
There's people with severe mood disorders
that they can't even control.
-
There are people who have just suffered
deranging traumas, etc. etc.
-
As for the corollary group,
-
its size was simply zero forever
until the Cold War,
-
when suddenly, the leaders
of two global alliances
-
attained the ability to blow up the world.
-
The number of people
with actual doomsday buttons
-
has stayed fairly stable since then.
-
But I'm afraid it's about to grow,
-
and not just to three.
-
This is going off the charts.
-
I mean, it's going to look
like a tech business plan.
-
(Laughter)
-
And the reason is,
-
we're in the era
of exponential technologies,
-
which routinely take
eternal impossibilities
-
and make them the actual superpowers
of one or two living geniuses
-
and -- this is the big part --
-
then diffuse those powers
to more or less everybody.
-
Now, here's a benign example.
-
If you wanted to play checkers
with a computer in 1952,
-
you literally had to be that guy,
-
then commandeer one of the world's
19 copies of that computer,
-
then used your Nobel-adjacent brain
to teach it checkers.
-
That was the bar.
-
Today, you just need to know someone
who knows someone who owns a telephone,
-
because computing
is an exponential technology.
-
So is synthetic biology,
-
which I'll now refer to as "synbio."
-
And in 2011, a couple of researchers
did something every bit as ingenious
-
and unprecedented as the checkers trick
-
with H5N1 flu.
-
This is a strain that kills
up to 60 percent of the people it infects,
-
more than Ebola.
-
But it is so uncontagious
-
that it's killed fewer
than 50 people since 2015.
-
So these researchers edited H5N1's genome
-
and made it every bit as deadly,
but also wildly contagious.
-
The news arm of one of the world's
top two scientific journals
-
said if this thing got out,
it would likely cause a pandemic
-
with perhaps millions of deaths.
-
And Dr. Paul Keim said
-
he could not think of an organism
as scary as this,
-
which is the last thing
I personally want to hear
-
from the Chairman of the National
Science Advisory Board on Biosecurity.
-
And by the way, Dr. Keim also said this --
-
["I don't think anthrax
is scary at all compared to this."]
-
And he's also one of these.
-
[Anthrax expert] (Laughter)
-
Now, the good news about the 2011 biohack
-
is that the people who did it
didn't mean us any harm.
-
They're virologists.
-
They believed they were advancing science.
-
The bad news is that technology
does not freeze in place,
-
and over the next few decades,
-
their feat will become trivially easy.
-
In fact, it's already way easier,
because as we learned yesterday morning,
-
just two years after they did their work,
-
the CRISPR system was harnessed
for genome editing.
-
This was a radical breakthrough
-
that makes gene editing
massively easier --
-
so easy that CRISPR
is now taught in high schools.
-
And this stuff is moving
quicker than computing.
-
That slow, stodgy white line up there?
-
That's Moore's law.
-
That shows us how quickly
computing is getting cheaper.
-
That steep, crazy-fun green line,
-
that shows us how quickly
genetic sequencing is getting cheaper.
-
Now, gene editing
and synthesis and sequencing,
-
they're different disciplines,
but they're tightly related.
-
And they're all moving
in these headlong rates.
-
And the keys to the kingdom
are these tiny, tiny data files.
-
That is an excerpt of H5N1's genome.
-
The whole thing can fit
on just a few pages.
-
And yeah, don't worry, you can Google this
as soon as you get home.
-
It's all over the internet, right?
-
And the part that made it contagious
-
could well fit on a single Post-it note.
-
And once a genius makes a data file,
-
any idiot can copy it,
-
distribute it worldwide
-
or print it.
-
And I don't just mean print it on this,
-
but soon enough, on this.
-
So let's imagine a scenario.
-
Let's say it's 2026,
to pick an arbitrary year,
-
and a brilliant virologist,
hoping to advance science
-
and better understand pandemics,
-
designs a new bug.
-
It's as contagious as chicken pox,
-
it's as deadly as Ebola,
-
and it incubates for months and months
before causing an outbreak,
-
so the whole world can be infected
before the first sign of trouble.
-
Then, her university gets hacked.
-
And of course,
this is not science fiction.
-
In fact, just one recent US indictment
-
documents the hacking
of over 300 universities.
-
So that file with the bug's genome on it
spreads to the internet's dark corners.
-
And once a file is out there,
it never comes back --
-
just ask anybody who runs
a movie studio or a music label.
-
So now maybe in 2026,
-
it would take a true genius
like our virologist
-
to make the actual living critter,
-
but 15 years later,
-
it may just take a DNA printer
you can find at any high school.
-
And if not?
-
Give it a couple of decades.
-
So, a quick aside:
-
Remember this slide here?
-
Turn your attention to these two words.
-
If somebody tries this
and is only 0.1 percent effective,
-
eight million people die.
-
That's 2,500 9/11s.
-
Civilization would survive,
-
but it would be permanently disfigured.
-
So this means we need
to be concerned about anybody
-
who has the faintest shot on goal,
-
not just geniuses.
-
So today, there's a tiny
handful of geniuses
-
who probably could make a doomsday bug
-
that's .1-percent effective
and maybe even a little bit more.
-
They tend to be stable and successful
and so not part of this group.
-
So I guess I'm sorta kinda
barely OK-ish with that.
-
But what about after technology improves
-
and diffuses
-
and thousands of life science
grad students are enabled?
-
Are every single one of them
going to be perfectly stable?
-
Or how about a few years after that,
-
where every stress-ridden
premed is fully enabled?
-
At some point in that time frame,
-
these circles are going to intersect,
-
because we're now starting to talk about
hundreds of thousands of people
-
throughout the world.
-
And they recently included that guy
who dressed up like the Joker
-
and shot 12 people to death
at a Batman premiere.
-
That was a neuroscience PhD student
-
with an NIH grant.
-
OK, plot twist:
-
I think we can actually survive this one
if we start focusing on it now.
-
And I say this, having spent
countless hours
-
interviewing global leaders in synbio
-
and also researching their work
for science podcasts I create.
-
I have come to fear their work, in case
I haven't gotten that out there yet --
-
(Laughter)
-
but more than that,
to revere its potential.
-
This stuff will cure cancer,
heal our environment
-
and stop our cruel treatment
of other creatures.
-
So how do we get all this without,
you know, annihilating ourselves?
-
First thing: like it or not,
synbio is here,
-
so let's embrace the technology.
-
If we do a tech ban,
-
that would only hand
the wheel to bad actors.
-
Unlike nuclear programs,
-
biology can be practiced invisibly.
-
Massive Soviet cheating
on bioweapons treaties
-
made that very clear, as does every
illegal drug lab in the world.
-
Secondly, enlist the experts.
-
Let's sign them up and make more of them.
-
For every million and one
bioengineers we have,
-
at least a million of them
are going to be on our side.
-
I mean, Al Capone
would be on our side in this one.
-
The bar to being a good guy
is just so low.
-
And massive numerical
advantages do matter,
-
even when a single bad guy
can inflict grievous harm,
-
because among many other things,
-
they allow us to exploit
the hell out of this:
-
we have years and hopefully decades
to prepare and prevent.
-
The first person to try something awful --
and there will be somebody --
-
may not even be born yet.
-
Next, this needs to be an effort
that spans society,
-
and all of you need to be a part of it,
-
because we cannot ask
a tiny group of experts
-
to be responsible for both containing
and exploiting synthetic biology,
-
because we already tried that
with the financial system,
-
and our stewards became
massively corrupted
-
as they figured out
how they could cut corners,
-
inflict massive, massive risks
on the rest of us
-
and privatize the gains,
-
becoming repulsively wealthy
-
while they stuck us
with the $22 trillion bill.
-
And more recently --
-
(Applause)
-
Are you the ones who have gotten
the thank-you letters?
-
I'm still waiting for mine.
-
I just figured they were
too busy to be grateful.
-
And much more recently,
-
online privacy started looming
as a huge issue,
-
and we basically outsourced it.
-
And once again:
-
privatized gains, socialized losses.
-
Is anybody else sick of this pattern?
-
(Applause)
-
So we need a more inclusive way
to safeguard our prosperity,
-
our privacy
-
and soon, our lives.
-
So how do we do all of this?
-
Well, when bodies fight pathogens,
-
they use ingenious immune systems,
-
which are very complex and multilayered.
-
Why don't we build one of these
for the whole damn ecosystem?
-
There's a year of TED Talks that could
be given on this first critical layer.
-
So these are just a couple
of many great ideas that are out there.
-
Some R and D muscle
-
could take the very primitive
pathogen sensors that we currently have
-
and put them on a very steep
price performance curve
-
that would quickly become ingenious
-
and networked
-
and gradually as widespread
as smoke detectors and even smartphones.
-
On a very related note:
-
vaccines have all kinds of problems
-
when it comes to manufacturing
and distribution,
-
and once they're made, they can't adapt
to new threats or mutations.
-
We need an agile biomanufacturing base
-
extending into every single pharmacy
and maybe even our homes.
-
Printer technology for vaccines
and medicines is within reach
-
if we prioritize it.
-
Next, mental health.
-
Many people who commit
suicidal mass murder
-
suffer from crippling,
treatment-resistant depression or PTSD.
-
We need noble researchers
like Rick Doblin working on this,
-
but we also need the selfish jerks
who are way more numerous
-
to appreciate the fact that acute
suffering will soon endanger all of us,
-
not just those afflicted.
-
Those jerks will then
join us and Al Capone
-
in fighting this condition.
-
Third, each and every one of us
can be and should be a white blood cell
-
in this immune system.
-
Suicidal mass murderers
can be despicable, yes,
-
but they're also terribly
broken and sad people,
-
and those of us who aren't
need to do what we can
-
to make sure nobody goes unloved.
-
(Applause)
-
Next, we need to make
fighting these dangers
-
core to the discipline
of synthetic biology.
-
There are companies out there
that at least claim
-
they let their engineers
spend 20 percent of their time
-
doing whatever they want.
-
What if those who hire bioengineers
-
and become them
-
give 20 percent of their time
to building defenses for the common good?
-
Not a bad idea, right?
-
(Applause)
-
Then, finally: this won't be any fun.
-
But we need to let our minds
go to some very, very dark places,
-
and thank you for letting me
take you there this evening.
-
We survived the Cold War
-
because every one of us understood
and respected the danger,
-
in part, because we had spent decades
-
telling ourselves terrifying ghost stories
-
with names like "Dr. Strangelove"
-
and "War Games."
-
This is no time to remain calm.
-
This is one of those rare times
when it's incredibly productive
-
to freak the hell out --
-
(Laughter)
-
to come up with some ghost stories
-
and use our fear as fuel
to fight this danger.
-
Because, all these
terrible scenarios I've painted --
-
they are not destiny.
-
They're optional.
-
The danger is still kind of distant.
-
And that means it will only befall us
-
if we allow it to.
-
Let's not.
-
Thank you very much for listening.
-
(Applause)